From September 13, 2006 to December 26, 2008 by proxy, Dave Sim kept up a daily blog called The Blog & Mail. It came to an end because his computer seized up and he decided to go back to his electric typewriter. Claude Flowers is presently inventorying the files recovered from the dead computer's harddrive.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Dave Sim's blogandmail #456 (December 11th, 2007)

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Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

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Okay, moving on to Impossible Thing #2. Here's Asa's take on that one:

#2 It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother – who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes – can be a contributing member of society.

"This is, of course, assuming that the only contribution the woman makes is her taxes…not that the job itself is of any benefit for society at all.

"As for the rest, see above. Childcare is for the children's development as much as, or more, than the parents'. A 30-year long study in Sweden showed that children who had daycare grew up to be more socially adept, more optimistic, and had a more positive view of themselves and their abilities. Especially those that started by the age of one – or earlier! The adults that were the most negative and unsure were those that were kept home with their mother until they started school."

Okay, again you're lumping a lot of unrelated things in together here – not the least of which is implying that daycare is for parents' development (a bizarre assertion) -- so let's see if I can't gently pull them apart, identify them individually and then, again, return to the actual subject.

Last thing first: "the adults that were the most negative and unsure were those that were kept home with their mother until they started school." Well, yes. I assume that what they are negative and unsure about is the wholesale capitulation to Marxist baby gulags as The Grand Way Forward For The People's Greater Personhood Revolution. If you weren't dumped as a baby and foisted off on relative strangers as a way of life growing up, you're apt to think that there's more to family life than baby dumping and foisting children off on relative strangers. Or, at least, that there should be. I mean, I understand that Marxist-feminism is based almost entirely on forward momentum. You people are emotional sharks, you always have to be moving forward and you always have to be positive about anything that women want to do no matter whether it's a good idea or not. Us "negative and unsure" types are just a little old-fashioned about thinking that it's better to do what works the best rather than changing it to suit the whims of baby-dumpers.

Yes, certainly pretty much any job benefits society.

The problem I had in originally framing the Impossible Things is that women don't like "sweeping generalizations" so I tried to phrase each of the Impossible Things in terms of a specific iconic individual because it's the only chance I was going to have for any women to even read what I had to say (at whatever distant point in the future that might occur). The point that I'm making is that where you attempt to institutionalize government-run, government-financed daycare you are immediately going to begin running a huge deficit. The least efficient way to do anything is to have government do it because the people in charge of the money have no vested interest in spending it wisely or efficiently. It isn't their money. Which is why the conservative view holds that government should only do those things that make sense to deal with collectively (i.e. you need a proportion of an entire country's wealth in order to have a viable military. All fifty states financing fifty different militaries isn't practical. In Quebec (which is the furthest along of any Marxist-feminist society that I know of in complete capitulation to no-holds-barred socialism in the daycare end of things) what they have is described as "subsidized" daycare where parents pay something like $3 a day (it might have been raised to $5) to have government daycares take care of their kids and the government picks up the rest of the tab. Oddly enough, we only have vague numbers on how much that turns out to be, both on a per space and in an overall budgetary sense, I suspect, for much the same reason that we don't know what socialized medicine actually costs: the numbers need to be dramatically fudged just to keep them at "high-end astronomical" and not "off even the theoretical radar screen".

At the time of the last Quebec nation-within-a-nation (they don't like to be called a province so we're appeasing them with nation-within-a-nation, now: so far so good) election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper basically paid Quebec a multi-billion dollar bribe – excuse me, equalisation payment is the Marxist-feminist euphemism ($15B?) -- that was ostensibly to improve health care in the province and which was basically put toward the nationalized daycare money pit/black hole by Jean Charest's government instead. It disappeared without a trace and will need to be reinforced by comparable amounts pretty much yearly if not every six months from now until the end of time. Basically, Alberta and Ontario are being drastically overtaxed in order to pay for Quebec's extreme socialism and bribe them into not separating.

It's a funny country that way, Asa.

But the point is that government-financed daycare is fiscally irresponsible because it is so dramatically disproportionate in terms of the trickle of dollars coming in the one end and the monstrous amount of money needed to supplement the trickle to even make a pretence at viability. I realize that women are tactical in nature so all they can see is the direct cause and effect: that someone needs to take care of their kids while they go out and work and it doesn't matter to them how much it costs to do that. Fifty thousand for a daycare space when she pays $1,000 a year in taxes? Fine, whatever. She has other things on her mind. But, like all forms of Marxism it isn't sustainable in the same way that Canada's sole-source government financed socialized medicine isn't sustainable.

I'm sure that the 30-year long study in Sweden showed that children who had daycare grew up to be more socially adept, more optimistic and had a more positive view of themselves and their abilities. They were raised by Marxist-feminists and that's really all Marxist-feminists believe in teaching: inflated self-importance. As a university educator I read recently was quoted as saying, all of his students had very high self-esteem and a good self image. They presented well, they played well with others and they all had good "people skills".

What they couldn't do was read or write.

They had no idea what a sentence was or a noun or a verb and they couldn't spell to save their lives (a handwritten sign in Sobey's this morning told me that the dinner rolls I was buying were "whole weat"). As he rather archly pointed out, he'd really prefer if they had a slightly lower (and consequently more accurate) self image and at least be able to write or read something.

As for the high self-esteem of all those newborn "baby dumping" – excuse me, "early childhood learning" – babies. Well, I've got a study of my own here, Asa. Oddly enough.

Tomorrow: Dr. Rebecca Sherlock, neonatology specialist at the British Columbia Children's and Women's Health Centre. Yes, a woman, so she has to be right, right?